


And those dizzy stargazers who dreamed of the black

by Radiolaria



Category: Star Trek: Discovery
Genre: A bunch of lost officers in search of a purpose, Aftermath, Character Study, Friendship, Gen, Post-Season/Series 02, Reflection, Season/Series 03 Spoilers, Speculation for season 03, Spoilers for Season 3 Trailer
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-02
Updated: 2020-03-02
Packaged: 2021-02-27 21:41:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,819
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22992616
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Radiolaria/pseuds/Radiolaria
Summary: Michael never loves them more than in the moments when they are shining in the distance, unreachable, watching over her.For three years, they are the only ones looking out for her.The aftermath of the jump.
Relationships: Michael Burnham & Discovery Crew, Michael Burnham & Mirror Philippa Georgiou, Michael Burnham & Sylvia Tilly, Michael Burnham/Ash Tyler (mentions)
Comments: 3
Kudos: 24





	And those dizzy stargazers who dreamed of the black

**Author's Note:**

> A quick character piece about finding purpose after everything ended. Bits and pieces of character arcs I am curious about for the next season. I hope you enjoy it.
> 
> Title from _New Constellations_ by Ryn Weaver.

Space is like… the most beautiful thing Tilly’s ever seen. Whatever the circumstances, it’s just breathtaking.

She doesn’t understand it to the extent someone as smart as Michael does, and Tilly’s pretty smart and actually aced her mandatory courses on astronomy and hyperspace as a Starfleet cadet, but… Okay, she does understand it perfectly, but the marvels of space never cease to leave her gobsmacked and giddy and small in a cool way.

Space isn’t just cool. Space is beautiful as a secretive, ridiculous, effervescent thing that’s so vast that even as time and space are warping around them to allow the ship to cross centuries in Michael’s path it looks like the most impossible kid’s birthday party, confetti made of stars flying everywhere.

Then she starts to notice the sparkles,  _ truly _ , their nature, the masses of light being hurled at the ship, across the viewscreen, as matter is subsiding into pure energy all around. Michael is in the middle of this, on her own, before them, stars know how many years ahead in this giant time slide. 

Tilly saw Reno’s math. On paper, it seemed terrifying and exciting, but now…

Now, it’s just terrifying to think of Michael exposed to all that with only the suit around her to protect her from time itself. 

They can barely follow her signal.

She’s alone.

She really shouldn’t be. 

It must be what? The eighth, nine times Tilly has done that to Michael. Not let her down but let her carry the burden all alone. 

When the shields went back up during the battle, Tilly had a brief moment of pride in the Jefferies tubes as she noted that it must be what Michael feels like saving the day. Maybe not exactly since Michael’s a bit shorter and she probably would have swapped the particle matrix and emitter by using a simple double pass over the interpolar drive, but…

Michael, not Tilly. That’s the problem, isn’t it?

And then Tilly had to crawl out of the bowel just after the light went out in this section and everything was shaking. She wanted someone to be there for her at the end of the tunnel, but everyone was still running around and shouting for help. The moment she stepped back onto the bridge, she had another task to accomplish, again and again.

Michael couldn’t hold her —and Reno gives odd hugs.

The worst is that now she cannot hold Michael, in the middle of whatever is happening to the fabric of reality before their eyes.

When did Michael stop experiencing what Tilly went through in the tubes? Did she ever?

They probably are all thinking this as they watch matter fly and burn around them as if the world itself was exploding into chunks of life and death. Her signal is so faint, but it’s everything keeping them not lost.

There’s no one else here but Michael, for centuries and light-years.

Tilly’s eyes show the world diffracted. She wipes it back in focus. 

It’s only when she hears Keyla’s hiss of pain that Tilly realizes that the Emperor is back on the bridge, watching with them the viewscreen. 

Her face is covered in blood, and she barely protests as she faints in Commander Nhan’s arms. 

***

After the Discovery finds Michael, she cannot convince herself to tolerate loneliness again. The feeling of shame wraps around her, dreadful, sickly, at every post, every seat she occupies on her own. All went so well while she was waiting, and now… 

The crew keeps their distance out of habit, an admission that the devoted speech they made upon departure was not born by love. In the end, Michael doesn’t know them enough, and they know of Michael only the story. Duty kept them bound, the Federation that doesn’t exist anymore in this time and place.

Michael cannot tell if their attempt to approach her, to know her since she came back is due to this gaping absence. There is comfort to be found in their reluctance: it is like a cushion, little room made for rest and understanding. They do not come to her to save the world again, Philippa points out to her over tea and liquor.

Spock acted in a similar manner after the attack. He left a selection of wild flowers on her pillow for her to study. 

Bryce left an updated star chart with notes about new names on her desk.

Tilly doesn’t try to avoid her.

Tilly missed Michael and says so the moment she embraces Michael in the shuttle bay area for the first time in what was only an hour or so from her perspective. She repeats it under her breath ten minutes after, while the conversation in the ready room about plans and desolation and Starfleet eventually runs dry and slow with uncertainty. 

Paul and Philippa, all sarcasm and bitterness one second before, go quiet. All eyes are on her, on them, as Tilly grabs her hand and cries out the words, again.

“I’ve missed you, Michael. I’m sorry.”

Tilly never stops repeating it to Michael. 

The annoyance Michael expected from such an open demonstration of love —in the mess hall, across the bridge, through coms— never comes. Michael’s heart skips a beat when she notices the look of envy on others.

Alone. They are all alone in space, displaced in time.

The empty planets, hostile or abandoned, come one after the other. Michael wonders if the group of people she met first when landing in this universe were real. The state of the Federation they disclosed before leaving to fight their wars would certainly be easier to stomach if it was nothing but a bad dream.

Michael could have followed Book’s lead, sought answers, tried to track down her mother… But then her chance to find her crew again would have been slim and without them, she will be truly lost.

She waited: the thought of her people, her ship, perhaps still 300, 700 years away from her, was worse than the three years, one month, six days and one hour it would take them to enter this side of reality.

She waited.

***

Hugh keeps checking the supplies, too often, too worried. 

The battle and jump to the future left them with many wounded and disoriented officers, too many for a skeleton crew meant to save the universe with an all-ending Hail Mary.

Michael assures them that this time still has medical supplies, even if it appears to be in disarray. Book’s appearance when he steps on the ship for the first time doesn’t bode well for the quantity of said medical supplies. He isn’t secretive about the state of the world the  _ Discovery _ landed in, and Hugh would have preferred he kept his realism to himself.

Tracy was adamant they did not skimp on medicine and bandages considering that they could end up in a time radically different from theirs. Everyone left the medbay healed after the battle and the three long minutes it took them to go out on the other side of the wormhole were not filled with cries of agony but awe. 

But the infirmary medical replicator runs out of material to produce certain specific molecules in the wake of the battle, namely N-Acetyl-L-Carnosine and L-Glutathione, essential components of, unfortunately, eye drops.

Georgiou has been far less sneery toward them after Tracy repaired her broken nose without leaving a freckle out of place. Hugh made sure a lacerated liver didn’t kill her, but she seemed to think this was less vital than a broken nose. She might also have been flirting with Doctor Pollard instead of him, a side-effect of concussion that he will not resent.

Subsequently, the former Emperor seems to  _ like _ them and has been treating the medical team slightly better than she does the rest of the crew, even offering to go on a recon mission to get them a molecule the computer had identified on the planet below and that could work as a substitute for pseudo-plaster.

And now, they don’t have eye drops to treat her extreme photosensitivity.

_ Hell hath no fury like a dictator blinded. _

He cannot fault Paul for trying to defend him when the Emperor catches him in the corridors, having stomped out of medbay without eyedrops in her possession. But Paul is going about it the wrong way, threatening her with physical harm, when Hugh knows from experience just how much pain she can take. There’s an eerie moment when Georgiou glares at them with menacing glee as she registers that Hugh is accepting to be protected in such a manner by Paul.

Georgiou counterattacks with a saucy jab, Paul misses the point entirely and starts wagging his finger, Tracy comes running with an eye solution that might relieve the dryness at least, Hugh rolls his eyes and walks away.

Paul is a few seconds behind. Hugh succeeds in not flinching when Paul’s fingers brush against the inside of his wrist, lightly.

He leaves every night after spending the evening with Paul. They talk and laugh, and if it feels like they are talking and laughing at each other instead of doing it together. It will do for now. The thought of being stuck in a distinct, war-torn future without someone to love and to be loved by leaves him haunted.

He dreams of long tunnels of darkness that expand into him, unseen by others, by the world that isn’t mineral and inert, until he’s made of stone and moss.

In the privacy of his quarters, Hugh caresses Paul‘s cheek and can pretend he followed the man he loved into an impossible future, on a once-in-a-lifetime voyage across time. He loves him. He would follow him there. He’s not sure that  _ he _ in this confession encompasses who Hugh is. 

Hugh thinks of Michael who spent three years on her own on one of the desertic planets they left behind on their way to whatever is ahead, and he wonders if solitude would help.

The way she looked at the crew when she saw them for the first time after so long, he’s not sure solitude has even anything to do with all this.

He wonders if she’s okay.

It is time he makes good on the word he gave her to drop by for tea a few days ago.

***

Philippa doesn’t do hugs or cuddles, even if the weight of her hands across one’s back, on one’s hand, conducts strength with the efficiency of magnets. And like magnetic fields, Michael is never quite sure how to use them without heavy protective equipment.

Outside of the suit she burnt and crashed into the future, she doesn’t wear protective equipment. She doesn’t have the strength for it at the moment.

It leaves her exposed, raw, in a way she hasn’t felt in years. Twenty-two years ago to be precise. Or twenty-five years. Or one thousand one hundred and three years. 

Others have been willing to lend theirs, armor or power. Paul, despite the recovery, Reno, Saru, with less reproach than usual, Hugh, Tilly, strangers and old faces, Keyla’s awkward jokes and Joann’s quiet smiles. 

And Ash, or the memory of him.

Truth is, Michael never got time to reconnect with him in a way that didn’t feel desperate. Everything was moving too fast around them and she clung to him as an anchor, when she would have hoped to understand him the way their holo conversations had suggested she could understand him – this Ash, not the one he was before. If time hadn’t faulted her, his decision to join Section 31 and to stay behind would have hurt less. 

She was always on the edge of knowing him. Now, she misses him. She mourns.

But Philippa knew that man, improbably. It transpires through anecdotes she throws away in jest and smirks Michael knows she picked from him. Michael catches them and clings to them.

The man Philippa talks about is ruthless and funny, quite different from the man Michael knew before, nonetheless attractive. He spent too much time moping around Philippa, but Michael suspects he reluctantly enjoyed her company. Tilly tells Philippa to her face that it is obvious she likes him, otherwise she would have not lowered her guard by getting drunk with him between shifts at Section 31. The reply was mean spirited and grotesque, as it often is with Philippa, but the discreet smile across Tilly’s lips proved the diminished power the Emperor held over the young woman.

The mystery of his decision comes into focus with each passing moment. Her mourning turns into healing, from him, for him. For the first time since the return from the mirror universe, she talks to Tilly about them, that  _ us _ she had to bury for survival’s sake but over which a strange, beautiful tree still grew.

Michael wept before Tilly like a teenage girl.

One night Philippa sleeps —stands guard on a chair— in their quarters while Tilly and Michael drift to sleep on the sofa, interlocked. They did not intend to talk that long after an exhausting day of playing hide and seek with a new species that positively hated the Starfleet logo, a warning Book had failed to mention before recommending they refueled their tritium on the planet.

They talk because despite the running and the shouting, it was a new world to discover and a new environment to study. New friends, eventually, would come around to help them.

Philippa snarls the whole evening while Tilly is getting more and more excited about the plants they have collected and Michael’s mind is brimming with ideas of the way their properties could be used. The Ensign’s arms are wrapped around Michael, warm and undeniable, distracting from the projections her mind is occupied with. Tilly’s grasp loosens in sleep but persists. Philippa pretends her drink is her only company. 

But Michael does not question why she is here. 

Her consciousness blinks out, contentedly.

Philippa’s snarls are reassuring. The voyage to the future, excruciating, the breadth of time and space still stretching her bones in her moment of unrest, the long and uncertain wait for her crew left her tender. Philippa is hard when Michael cannot be anymore.

Her hardness in the face of the unknown, when the crew around them is shifting and teetering with fear and unmet hope, with idleness and loneliness, answers a question Michael is afraid to ask: 

_ What do we have ahead of us but something relentless and fruitless? Something that only satisfies itself in the search and the hunt? Something impossible to discover for the sole reason it has already been? _

Lost in space, now that they have accomplished the last task to save the past, how is it their role to live in the future? 

***

Saru sits in the viewing bay and thinks about Siranna. He doesn’t talk to her. How superstitious and vain it would be, and he hopes he has grown into a different person, a different  _ commander _ , since he last talked to her in the privacy of his room.

But he can watch the stars with her. Humans would approximate it to a  _ communion _ . He enjoys the idea, even if it was suggested by Reno, who shows little respect for him for the hour or so he was captain between the moment Pike left the bridge and Book took charge of the ship _. _

It wasn’t an agreeable moment in his career, but the bridge agreed that in the absence of a captain with knowledge of the time they are stranded in, appointing a friendly face Michael has known for three years is not an unsafe idea.

His hand absently brushes against the back of his neck, seeking the absent delicate members. It is one problem to fear an uncertain future, it is another to be in one.

Captain Book is not on the bridge that much. In fact, he is rarely within communication range. 

There is a conflict going on that none of the populations or surviving Federation representatives they met so far can explain in terms that are genuinely clarifying. All the points of references and events referred to mean nothing.

Book invests his time in the present rather than in a stranded ship from a distant past. 

“Seen any new stars lately?”

Commander Reno’s lilting voice bounces around the empty viewing bay, her steps cushioned by her perennial furry white slippers.

“Commander, we have not jumped that far ahead in the future that new stars are popping around the sky.”

As he turns to scowl at her, her form is still surrounded by shadows, halfway down the bay. She has, at last, heeded his prayer to announce herself as he watches the stars.

“Hmm. I saw an exploding mushroom eat a very large rodent last week.” She stops dead on her tracks and frowns pensively. “Ensign Tilly classified it as a  _ bird _ , not particularly large, but I reckon our combined inexperience with rodents is trumped by the possibility any mushroom in any time would rely on getting their food from the sky as opposed to the ground.”

When she interrupts her exposé, she’s at eye level with Saru, having joined him on the edge of the platform and stepped onto the observation bench. The logic behind that point of venture, repeated each time they meet on the viewing bay, escapes him. 

“Hence the shoes, Commander?” 

“Don’t insult Hell and Hello?” she drawls, staring at the vast, still familiar, patterns of lights.

These are supposed to be rabbits, Saru is sure, but so stylized they could well be other Earth creatures. Januzzi introduced a few to him while they were posted on the  _ Shenzhou _ , bringing a different pet every other month on board. Despite his obvious concerns for hygiene, Saru found the attention not only touching but also incredibly instructive.

He had only read about rabbits to this point.

They were more talkative than he expected, for animals without a voice. 

Siranna would have loved them and many of the creatures they are meeting here. A millennium of evolution ahead transformed life itself in a most enchanting manner, even if wars have taken so much of it too. Their away team hasn’t observed descendants of rabbits yet.

He misses Jannuzzi. 

He was already missing him when he was in the past, too cowardly to reach out to his old colleague after the  _ Shenzhou _ was destroyed.

Unlike with Siranna, Starfleet actively encouraged Saru to talk to him. Human approach to grieving. No amount of drive to adapt to their ways would get him to see him again.

He never showed rabbits to his sister, in flesh or as slippers.

“D’ya know how they got that name by the way?” 

Commander Reno’s voice does not drop to the level required for confidence, which her opening question heralds. In the empty, barely lit viewing bay, it suggests a greater solitude than Saru knows to exist on this ship. They are still sixty-one souls on the ship after all. 

“Aru, the guy who gave them to me,” Reno continues without concern for his silence. “Also, a really nice suite near the captain’s quarters, but keep that to yourself.  _ Well _ , Aru told me before leaving with the  _ Enterprise _ that if there was any chance we made it to nine hundred years into the future, I should start a naming contest with the remaining engineers and each would suggest a number that we would then…”

He’s thankful she disregarded his orders about not disrupting his  _ communions _ . 

***

From her quarters bathed in the cold light of this world, Michael writes to her family, both of them lost to time.

She tells of the people they meet on their uncertain journey, of the unrecognizable cultures they are reunited with, of the cities eaten by a new life and of the time she has to lose here. Without the Federation, the Alpha quadrant has long stopped being the heart of human activity. There is little collaboration left between species formerly united by Starfleet, when their civilization endures. Such is the course of History, and after the initial shock of stepping into a future as familiar to her as the ruins of Ancient Greek, she caved in.

Decay is natural.

It is not the apocalypse foretold by the dying mycelial network or the Klingon’s fury, no more than it is the stark void threatened by Control, whose millions of lifeless bodies now lie on Reno’s work table, for science. It isn’t even the demise of freedom and hope heralded by the very woman now gravely watching the stars a few meters from her.

It is life after them, after what they built and protected has ended, their culture gone, their descendants indistinguishable. Book didn’t speak Standard when Michael first met him, but his translator identified quickly that her tongue was an ancient form of his.

If Michael was to reach back for Spock now, rather than immediately after completing the jump, she is not convinced Spock would recognize her. There is nothing left of their fight this far into the future and nothing of the ideals that saved them.

The realization is not saddening, but the irony of the words she gifted to her brother before jumping does not escape her now. They have no place in the future. Whatever war Book is fighting, they have no legitimacy in shaping its outcome. They are relics from a time before some of the civilizations involved were born. 

Control, the Klingons, Starfleet… Over the past few years, they all nearly drove the universe to extinction, pursuing old ideals of unification and progress. One thousand years into the future, after centuries of life, the Federation is as sand on a beach.

Fragments, bones, micro-organisms.

_ What good would it do to try to reshape mountains and whales out of them? _

Someone softly bumps into her hip in passing. Paul roams the bridge to hand out a few of his latest creations: he and his science officers have been trying to use the matter available on land, rather than their precious resources, for the food replicators. The results have been surprising so far. 

Book grimaced but confessed it was better than the abomination they’ve tried to feed him the first time he dined on the ship.

Paul catches Michael’s eyes and leans in, smiling as he offers a bright orange muffin.

“Can I interest you in this week’s special?”

Michael accepts the treat, frowning at its surprising lightness in her hand.

“Thank you, commander. Seaweed?”

Paul grins smugly.

“Mushroom. Full of vitamins,” he sings as he walks back toward Owosekun’s station, where the communication officer is eagerly awaiting his arrival.

Michael brings the strange muffin to her face, trying to parse out the smells and failing miserably. She has no frame of reference for the fresh, sunny fragrances there. The world is just familiar enough for them to attempt to recognize something of what it was, but it never is.

Months have passed since she’s been reunited with the ship and the uncertainty of her fate has been simplified to uncertainty of everything. 

When she reaches out, she finds herself looking down instead of up, right instead of left. She wonders if this is the way the first explorers of old felt when then floated in space for the first time.

Another light pressure grazes her side, Tilly advising her not to eat Paul’s creation at all. She babbles about the way he chose to pair up sample #57 and #09 instead of #57 and #21, and Tilly has been conducting a survey around the lab: most people find the taste of sample #09 overpowering and too  _ unique _ .

“A good chemist does not necessarily make a good cook,” she concludes, despondent. She stares at Michael for a good minute, pinching her bottom lip nervously.

“You are not okay, aren’t you?”

Michael averts her eyes and contemplates the bridge, made busier by Paul’s impromptu distribution of goods. Nhan and Philippa are glaring at him from a corner, nevertheless holding a piece each. Tracy is chatting with Reno and Saru, while Joann and Rhys are writing down something from his monitor on a PADD. Detmer is quietly looking at the stars at her station, nibbling absently on the muffin, while Paul is giving away the last cakes.

“No, not really.” 

But the very fact she has the strength to utter these words, after the last six years of silence, means something is changing. Yesterday, she had a long chat with Hugh, about Ash and death, about family and duty, about faith and Philippa. She came out of it with the feelings she had not accomplished anything. 

Perhaps, it was the point.

For as long as she can remember, she has looked to the stars to discover who she is, isolating structure and patterns in the unknown.

Now, there are people she wants to know, more than stars; this time isn’t hers to know yet.

“I’ve missed you, Michael,” Tilly whispers for the hundredth time, and her fingers squeeze Michael’s.

Michael closes her eyes and lets the feeling infuse her mind and body. This present sensation, in the future. These uncertainties. These memories and how they feel now. Perhaps she doesn’t need to write about everything that is new here. This is hers, now, these people, this blank page. 

“I know.”

***

Chaos is the opposite of order.

This principle above all shaped her reign. There was nothing to enjoy in chaos and nothing to build a life on. Power, progress, even passion could not be sustained in confusion. Order was hard on the body, on the mind, even she could recognize it, but it wasn’t chaos.

Turns out neither chaos nor order holds a candle to emptiness.

A slow desolation has been winning over the universe, lives and civilizations teetering on the edge. There is little to conquer, not enough matter for an acceptable catch, even less to weave a web. She has been bored in her life before, made prisoner and left for dead, but this time is empty of everything that drove her to break free of previous unfortunate circumstances.

She chews on the feeling and its disgusting implications until it thickens to a glue in her mouth. She jerks out of her seat on the bridge, ready to spit it out at someone’s face, but the rare crew members are like statues watching out for something in the stars.

_ Did no one think of what they were going to do once they’d crossed? _

Book doesn’t want to involve them in his fight. Philippa was never one to say no to war, but what she glimpses of it is so insignificant,  _ empty _ , that she doesn’t understand why the crew even bothered vetoing participation in the first place.

This world is barely alive, and what is left is changing into something they cannot understand.

Philippa is a conqueror. This isn’t her stage.

Two people enter the bridge in her back, their steps close to one another, related, interspersed; Detmer and Owosekun.

Philippa turns a disinterested eye to them as they make their way to the center of the bridge and chat with the officers at their post. 

She doesn’t enjoy seeing them like this, prostrate when the memories of their sharpness are still fresh in her mind. The only way she was letting someone as uncommitted as her Michael fly the  _ Shenzhou _ , her jewel, was if Detmer was there to watch her. Commander Owosekun was more than a steady hand in combat and careful mind in plotting; she was a trusted second despite her young years.

The distrust in their eyes begets no respect, only a phantom pain, not aimed at her. Nothing to do in this time and place. No one to be.

Philippa rounds the corner of an empty station. Operations. If she takes control of the ship, it will still not fill this decaying world. If she runs away, it will still not substantiate her name. 

Detmer’s fingers are drumming a song on the back of a seat, a song that she carried with her a millennium away. 

Her sister’s. 

Philippa overheard her in the mess hall two days ago. Detmer wanted to start a band with a few of the officers on the ship. She used to play with her sister, and her sister is not here. Some of the crew members agreed —Stamets, Pollard, Tourneur and the man who takes care of the plants from their expeditions.

Owosekun, true to the driven woman Philippa remembers her to be, declined then. She’s humming with Keyla now and laughing in her neck.

The sky is still empty, the constellations infuriatingly familiar.

_ Will they have to build something here to experience the thrill again? _

***

  
  
  
  


***

This is the blank space where Michael longs for them and loves them, when her friends are racing in the distance, unreachable, all eyes, toward her.


End file.
